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Biography of John Cooney
Interviewer of Oral History of Judge John Bates (2020-2022)
I graduated Magna Cum Laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Brown University in
1970, with a major and a year of graduate study in microeconomics and
macroeconomics. I graduated from the University of Chicago Law School in
1973, where I served on the board of the Law Review and was elected to the Order
of the Coif.
I received extensive training in constitutional law as an Assistant to the Solicitor
General in the Department of Justice in 1975 and 1976. From 1977 to1982, I
served as an Associate at Wilmer, Cutler, and Pickering. In that capacity, I helped
litigate a Supreme Court case, Plyer v. Doe, 457 U.S. 202 (1982), in which the
Court declared unconstitutional, as a violation of the Equal Protection Clause of
the 14th Amendment, a statute enacted by Texas in 1975 which denied
undocumented alien children the right to obtain a free education in its public
schools, and thereby denied these uneducated children the opportunity to achieve.
From 1982 to 1987, I served as Deputy General Counsel of the Office of
Management and Budget in the Executive Office of the President. In that capacity
I helped defend President Reagan’s regulatory review program from Congressional
challenges. I also assisted several Directors of the OMB Office of Information and
Regulatory Affairs in resolving policy disagreements with major regulatory
agencies about the content of their rules. In addition, I ran the program within
OMB that was responsible for drafting the Executive Orders, Proclamations, and
Presidential Memoranda that President Reagan issued.
After leaving OMB, I spent the next 30 years litigating administrative law cases
before federal trial and appellate courts, where I specialized in financial, securities,
and environmental cases. In my 26 years as a partner at Venable LLP, I served as
the senior adviser to my colleagues about the litigation of federal trial, appellate,
and Supreme Court cases.
Starting in 2015, I served as a senior official of the Section on Administrative Law
and Regulatory Affairs of the American Bar Association. My colleagues then
elected me to serve as Chair of the Section from 2017-2018.
After the Administrative Conference of the United States was reestablished by
Congress in 2010, I was chosen by its Chairman to serve for five years as the Chair
of ACUS’s Standing Committee on Administration and Management. In that
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capacity, I led its experts on administrative law in achieving consensus approval of
the Committee’s proposed recommendations to Congress, the White House and
federal agencies to promote efficiency and fairness in the administration of
government programs.
I retired from Venable on December 31, 2018, the evening before I reached my
70th birthday and could celebrate a complete career.